The Good Life: R.I.P.

By Gerald Clarke

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE COUNTRY HOUSE

by Christopher Simon Sykes Mayflower; 224 pages; $19.95

The Italians amused themselves with art, the French with cooking. But only the British could have invented the country house: that place where heaven, earth and regiments of servants labored to assure the ruling class that life was indeed worth living. For two centuries this way of life flourished, only to fall victim to war, inflation and the refusal of the lower orders to go on tugging their forelocks. There are a few survivors who still remember the dim and faded glory of the English country house, but for most of us this book of photographs will have to do. In fact, it does very nicely, with just enough text by Author Christopher Simon Sykes to explain the pictures but not enough to smother them with sociology.

The story begins with Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister. Englishmen had had country houses before Walpole, of course, but it was he, in the 1720s and '30s. who first used one to bring men together to mix fun and politics. "Up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc.," wrote one of the guests at Walpole's stag affairs, "and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch." As roads and transportation improved, being a guest became more convenient. Women joined the fun, and the weekend house party began its long and bleary-eyed journey toward today.

Amusements were much in demand, and desperate hosts tried virtually everything to protect their guests from boredom. The Duke of Devonshire installed a private theater at Chatsworth, and Lord Pembroke held an annual cricket week at Wilton. The Duke of Westminster was famous for his shoots. At half past ten, recalled one visitor, the Duke would approach the gentlemen in the crowd and inquire, "Care to come out and see if we can pick up a pheasant or two?" By lunchtime a thousand dead birds littered the grounds. "The Duke never shot after lunch," noted one visitor, "but while he was shooting, he liked to be busy."

The invention of photography, about 1840, was a diversion both sexes delighted in; no gathering was complete without a camera. Few of the photos reprinted here have real artistic merit, but that, oddly enough, is their strength. They show the Victorian aristocracy as it saw itself: serene, assured and confident, as no one has been since, that tomorrow would be just the same as today. In one 1858 picture. Lord Palmerston, who was soon to be Prime Minister, stands with a group on the impressive steps of his manor, Broadlands; his top hat makes him look ten feet tall, and, judging by the expression on his face, that is precisely how he felt.

That granitic certainty was propped up by a docile servant class, whose images occupy some of the book's most haunting pages. The bride of the second son of the first Baron Leconfield, for instance, undertook to photograph "all the dear servants at Petworth, 1860, when I came there." They include the butler, the underbutler, the park keeper, the keeper of the stallions, the coachman, the housekeeper. Lord Leconfield's valet, Lady Leconfield's maid, the French cook, the first groom of the chambers, and so on. Big houses often had as many as 50 people working downstairs. Yet strange as it may appear to the modern eye, the servants have the same look of calm self-assurance as the masters: if the castes exchanged clothes, it would be impossible to tell the difference between them.

The pictures have taken on a significance that neither photographer nor model could even have anticipated, and snapshots taken of everyday events have become valuable historical and even literary documents. Marcel Proust, another devotee of the country house, phrased it well when he wrote that "a photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist."

The beginning of the end was World War I, and one of the casualties was the servant mentality; the upper class no longer had a lower one to lean on. The country house survived a little longer, and even had a renaissance during the '20s and '30s, when the Evelyn Waugh crowd made elfin sport amid the topiaries. World War II and all that followed it, most notably extortionate taxes and the declining British economy, finally put these gay places to rest. A book like this, which has pedestrian prose but enchanting pictures, is perhaps the best memorial to these architectural idyls.

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